Everyone knows that music and films have long since ceased to have any monetary value—mostly because you scofflaws keep gorging yourself at the all you can eat buffet of pilfered content. But that hasn’t necessarily trickled down to books yet, despite the fact that publishers were found to have been engaging in price-fixing and forced to pay a huge settlement earlier this year.

The fact is, books just seem like they’re worth more to a lot of us, even if, you know, they’re not necessarily worth as much as the publishers might want them to be. But when an opportunity arrives to re-up on a package of 8 great books on a pay-what-you-want scale arrives, it’s hard to resist, especially when it’s such a cool selection. That’s the idea behind the new Humble Bundle offer, which has put together an amazing group of sci-fi titles from some of the best writers working right now. The group, which has previously done similar offers with video games and music, allows you to pay what you want for six titles, (pay more than the average and you’ll get two more thrown in), and decide how much of the price you want to go to the authors, how much to a charity they’ve associated with on each particular offer, and how much to Humble Bundle for providing the service. This time the charities in question are the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the Science Fiction Writers Association, and the Child’s Play Charity.

I just bought one package for myself and two for my nerdy friends. Two of the books happen to be by one of my favorite short story writers of the past ten years, Kelly Link, whose fantastical and often horrifying shorts transcend any sort of boundary between the literary and the magical. A third, Zoo City, I can wholeheartedly recommend as an imaginative, neo-noir sci-fi page turner, while the rest are all books or authors I’ve been meaning to get around to, but just never had the chance. Not til now anyway.

Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean, Old Man’s War by John Scalzi, Pirate Cinema by Cory Doctorow, Pump Six by Paolo Bacigalupi, Zoo City by Lauren Beukes, Invasion by Mercedes Lackey, Stranger Things Happen and Magic for Beginners by Kelly Link.